Mike is a retired stock broker, and now published author of Gold Rush!. In addition, he is a freelance writer specializing in real estate, personal finance and home decor now writing from San Miguel, Mexico.

Entries Tagged as ''

We watched American Idol tonight. Some great performances of even greater songs written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Of course my favorite to win AI is Pia Toscano, not that Luke and Hailey didn’t sing well. Pia is the whole package; looks and voice. She’s another Mariah, Celine and Whitney rolled into one appealing package. Out of the eleven we must kick off two tomorrow night. Right now I’d say bye to Thia and Stephano.

At commercial breaks I’d ask Bev, why are we in Libya? Why aren’t we in Syria? And if we are in Libya, shouldn’t we be in Syria and Iran. Some say the cost of Libya so far is $500 million. Could that be right? Why are we in Libya? How are we going to afford Libya? We don’t seem to have enough money here at home. Why are we in Libya? Why were we in Iraq, but we were led to believe we shouldn’t have been. Aren’t the reasons we are in Libya the same reasons we were in Iraq?

At the end of American Idol, Randy said the judges have used their only “save.” It’s now up to America to make the correct choices in our voting for who stays and who goes. We now have the power and he trusts us to make the correct decisions. I thought, yeah like the decision to put Obama into office. Why are we in Libya?

Here is a simple question for you: which would you rather buy right now, gold or silver?

Gold has incredible amounts of emotional baggage attached to it, while silver is in a different league â€“ at least for the moment. This video will show you two indicatorsthat can help you capture either market when and if the upward trend decides to resume.

With all of the worldâ€™s troubles, there are plenty of reasons why one would think that both of these markets should be much higher. The question is, why arenâ€™t they? I think that the video youâ€™re about to watch will help answer some of those questions.

As always our videos are free to watch and there are no registration requirements. All we ask is that you take the time to perhaps comment on the blog about what you think of the video and also what you think of gold and silver. Please feel free to Tweet or email your friends about this video.

From Adam Hewison, wishing you every success in the markets, trading, and life.

Ellen Brown writes today that “…the budget crises now being suffered by nearly all the states did not arise from too much spending or too little taxation. They arose from a credit freeze on Wall Street. In the wake of the 2009 financial market collapse, banks curtailed their lending more sharply than in any year since 1942, driving massive unemployment and causing local tax revenues to plummet.”

How then can we restore credit in the state?Â The FED is not authorized to do it, plus that would only increase our national debt.Â Brown says, “One measure that is drawing increasing interest is the creation of a bank modeled on the Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the only state-owned bank in the country. The BND has a 92-year history of safe, secure and highly profitable banking. North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country; and in 2009, when other states were floundering, it had the largest budget surplus it had ever had.

Eight states now have bills pending either to form state-owned banks or to do feasibility studies to determine their potential. This year, bills were introduced in the Oregon State legislature on January 11; in Washington State on January 13; in Massachusetts on January 20 (following a 2010 bill that lapsed); and in the Maryland legislature on February 4. They join Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii, and Louisiana, which introduced similar bills in 2010. The Center for State Innovation, based in Madison, Wisconsin, was commissioned to do detailed analyses for Washington and Oregon. Their conclusion was that state-owned banks in those states would have a substantial positive impact on employment, new lending, and state and local government revenue.

Oregon Rep. Bob Jenson has introduced House Bill 2972.

Banks â€œcreateâ€ money by leveraging their capital into loans. At an 8% capital requirement, they can leverage capital by a factor of twelve, so long as they can attract sufficient deposits (collected or borrowed) to clear the outgoing checks. States give this leveraging power away when they put their deposits in Wall Street banks and invest their capital there.

State and municipal governments have assets tucked all over the state in separate rainy day funds, which are largely invested in Wall Street banks for a very modest return. At the same time, states are borrowing from Wall Street at much higher interest rates and have to worry about such things as credit ratings, late fees, and interest rate swaps, which have proven to be very good investments for Wall Street and very bad investments for local governments.

By consolidating their assets into their own state-owned banks, state and local governments can leverage their own funds to finance their own operations; and they can do this essentially interest-free, since they will own the bank and will get the interest back. The BND contributed over $300 million to state coffers in the past decade, a notable achievement for a state with a population that is less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County.

Imagine that!Â We send our money to Wall Street and receive modest returns.Â You know what money in a CD fetches these days!Â Â Then Wall Street turns around and loans that money back to us at outrageous interest rates. or worse, turns down needy small business starving for funds.

A State Bank has been run successfully in North Dakota for 92 years.Â Let’s move ahead and open a State Bank of Oregon and pay ourselves first.

Here’sÂ Barbara Dudley speaking about the Oregon economy and the need for a State Bank:

Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who in 1984 strode onto a podium to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died on Saturday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She was 75.

The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, a blood ancer that she had battled for 12 years, her family said in a statement.

The day is near that we will see a woman president or vice-president. It’s about time!

A 1.3 magnitude earthquake struck the town of East Haddam, Connecticut Wednesday night.Â Big deal you say.Â Most people would never feel a 1.3 quake.Â It’s a tipple to the 9.0 that hit Japan or the 750 aftershocks that followed.Â But this quake was different.Â It appeared to bring back the “Moodus Noise.”Â When the earthquake struck residents heard a loud noise.

A loud bang heard across the area sparked a response from local police and fire departments who feared an explosion at a house, sending them around town searching for the cause. But it was called off once police said they received a report of the geologicalÂ disturbance.

Entrance to “Moodus Noises” cave on Cave Hill, 1940s

What are Moodus Noises? According to Wikipedia:

Moodus is infamous in Connecticut for the strange noises coming from the woods which have been termed “Moodus noises”, and are attributed to shallow micro-earthquakes. The noises can be heard most strongly from Cave Hill,located next to Mt. Tom and owned by the Cave Hill Resort.

In Legendary Connecticut, author David Philips asserts that the Moodus noises were the source of an indigenous religious cult important to local Native Americans. Local Algonquin chiefs (Sachems) would gather around Mt. Tom in order to experience the living presence of the god Hobomock. Pequot, Mohegan and Narragansett tribes participated in this cult, and according to local Alison Guinness, the Wangunks were involved as well. The Algonquins called the area Matchemadoset or Matchitmoodus meaning “the Place of Bad Noises,” since Hobomock was considered an evil deity.

Inflation – we all know price increases are more than the government is telling us.

Kansas leaves out the real reason that Gold and Silver are rising.Â Investors are waking up to the fact that we are insolvent, as Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said yesterday.

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when…”

But, most of us who follow the economy closely conclude it’s too late. We either have to stop the debt growth now and suffer the pain or the economy collapses and we suffer big pain. We have a fiat currency, as do most of the countries of the world and all fiat currencies fail. What’s Gold and Silver worth if you don’t have enough dollars to buy it from me? Why would anyone trade a hard asset for paper that’s not worth the paper its printed on?

When it dawns on our fellow citizens that their currency is really failing, there will be a mad scramble to get rid of the stuff. You don’t want to hold paper when the music stops.

I’m grateful to Dave Kansas for his list, but they are mostly just symptoms not the cause.

trading

Warning: mysql_real_escape_string() [function.mysql-real-escape-string]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysqld.sock' (2) in /homepages/7/d182093141/htdocs/movermike/wp-content/plugins/yolink-search/yolink-search.php on line 2268

Warning: mysql_real_escape_string() [function.mysql-real-escape-string]: A link to the server could not be established in /homepages/7/d182093141/htdocs/movermike/wp-content/plugins/yolink-search/yolink-search.php on line 2268